Shonda Buchanan reads from her newest poetry collection, along with special guests.
Sunday, June 1 · 5 – 6:30pm PDT
Village Well Books & Coffee
9900 Culver Boulevard #1b Culver City, CA 90232
Join us at Village Well Books & Coffee for a poetry reading of The Lost Songs of Nina Simone!
Pushcart nominee Shonda Buchanan will read from her newest collection, inspiried by the iconic singer. Joining Shonda are acclaimed authors Toni Ann Johnson and Ryane Nicole Granados.
About the participants:
Pushcart Prize nominee, Oxfam Ambassador, USC Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities Fellow and City of Los Angeles (COLA) Department of Cultural Affairs Master Artist Fellow, Shonda Buchanan is the author of five books, including the award-winning memoir, Black Indian. Shonda is also a faculty member in Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. An award-winning poet, fiction, nonfiction writer, and educator, Shonda is the recipient of the Brody Arts Fellowship from the California Community Foundation, a Big Read grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, several Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grants, the Denise L. Scott and Frank Sullivan Awards, and an Eloise Klein-Healy Scholarship. Consulting Curator Poet for The Broad Art Museum, Shonda is also a Sundance Institute Writing Arts fellow, a PEN Center Emerging Voices fellow and a Jentel Artist Residency fellow. Finalist for the 2021 Mississippi Review poetry contest, Shonda’s memoir, Black Indian, won the 2020 Indie New Generation Book Award and was chosen by PBS NewsHour as a “Top 20 books to read” to learn about institutional racism. About to enter a 3rd printing, Black Indian begins the saga of her family’s migration stories of Free People of Color communities exploring identity, ethnicity, landscape, and loss. Her first collection of poetry, Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?, was nominated for the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the Library of Virginia Book Awards.
Toni Ann Johnson won the Flannery O’Connor Award for her linked story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste, selected for the prize and edited by Roxane Gay. The book was nominated for a 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and shortlisted for the 2024 Saroyan Prize. A novella, Homegoing, won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest and was published in 2021. Johnson’s first novel, Remedy for a Broken Angel, was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. In 2024, she was selected by Crystal Wilkinson as an inaugural winner of the Screen Door Press Prize for her linked story collection, But Where’s Home? forthcoming in February of 2026.
Ryane Nicole Granados has always called Los Angeles her home and her writing finds its roots in her love of her community. She is inspired to write stories of survival that magnify the marginalized while also unearthing the splendor of second chances. Ryane earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles and she was named the 2021 Established Writer and Individual Arts Fellow by the California Arts Council. Currently, Ryane teaches at Loyola Marymount University where she also serves as the Associate Director of the Academic Resource Center and Writing Center. Her literary work has been featured in various publications including Pangyrus, The Manifest-Station, High Country News, The Atticus Review, and LA Parent Magazine. Her storytelling has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and showcased in KPCC’s live series Unheard LA. Her novella, The Aves, debuted October 8, 2024.
About the book:
Nina Simone’s ghost lives in these poems by award-winning author, Shonda Buchanan. Like the icon’s life and art, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone is complex, daring, sensuous, hard and soft all at once.
Shonda Buchanan weaves a prism of language, sound and light around and through the life of concert pianist, singer and Civil Rights activist, the incomprehensible Nina Simone. With this book, Buchanan is declaring this The Century of the Black Woman, providing a realistic glimpse into not only Simone’s life, but the lives of Black women in America, past and present, and their choices in a myopic, unforgiving country.
A grandchild of enslaved Africans, American Indians and Irish migrants, born into poverty as Eunice Waymon in a traditionally large family, Nina Simone lived a life few Black American women lived during the Jim Crow era in the South, yet rose to ultimately impact the world with her creative genius and determined spirit. This book is both an emotional and historical excavation of an artist’s life, capturing the rise and descent of that life, including Simone’s family history, her childhood and young womanhood, as well as the addiction, mental health struggles and abuse.
The Lost Songs of Nina Simone embodies the rich legacy—the pleats between the cloth—of Simone’s artistry, beauty, self-immolation and rage.
